By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

Book Information

*New approach: mixing in young bilinguals is the same as code-switching inadults*Empirical evidence that only grammars of the two languages constraincode-switching*Role of functional categories in mixed utterances is reanalyzed and developed*Mixed utterances help to shed light on issues in linguistics theory

The goal of this volume is to prove that mixed utterances in youngbilinguals can be analyzed in the same way as adult code-switching.Analyzing a rich corpus of spontaneous child data, the author providesdetailed empirical evidence for latest minimalist assumptions on thearchitecture of mind and confirms that code-switching is only constrainedby the two grammars of the languages involved. The data show that thequantity of mixing in children depends on an individual choice rather thanon language development, language dominance, or other factors.

Besides critically reviewing the literature on language mixing in childrenand adults, this work offers a thorough grammatical analysis of thecode-switching data of five Italian/German children. The book provides newinsights not only in the field of code-switching and of language mixing inyoung bilinguals, but also in issues concerning general questions onlinguistic theory which are difficult to be answered with monolingual data.